The Rev Margaret Thrall, who has died aged 81, had a long and distinguished career as a theologian, and taught at the University of Wales, Bangor, between 1962 and 1996. She was a terrifying New Testament Greek tutor, demanding exceptionally high standards of her students, who struggled to keep up, but she was always very supportive of any ideas we had in tutorials.
There was also another side to her. In the late 1960s, the Biblical Studies Students' Club began to ask her to their somewhat wacky dos and she was, at first, amazed to be invited. Soon, however, she joined in pancake and spaghetti parties with gusto, revealing a wicked sense of humour.
She had been the first doctoral student at Cambridge of the Rev Professor CFD Moule, became associate editor of the journal New Testament Studies and published many books and articles throughout her career. Her Greek Particles in the New Testament (1962) and two-volume commentary on II Corinthians (1994, 2000) are well known to New Testament scholars.
Her first monograph in 1958 was The Ordination of Women to the Priesthood and she became one of the first women to be ordained in the Church in Wales. She served as Canon Theologian at Bangor Cathedral from 1994 until 1997. In 1997, she was awarded the Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies by the British Academy and a Festschrift to mark her 75th birthday was published in 2003.
We kept in touch for many years, meeting up occasionally after I left Bangor, and she was always generous and supportive to a rather lazy student, taking a real interest in my career. I am proud that I was able to call her a friend.